


Leave behind your Ghosts

by Bythia



Series: Just Write: Trope-Bingo 2020 [2]
Category: Torchwood
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Episode: s01e04 Cyberwoman, Gen, Hopeful Ending, canon minor character death, mention of suicidal thougths (because Ianto is in a bad place)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-27
Updated: 2020-08-27
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:01:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,966
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26136178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bythia/pseuds/Bythia
Summary: After the events around the Ghost Machine, Ianto makes a different decision about his secret in the Hub and Jack finds himself confronted with more than one nightmare.
Relationships: Ianto Jones/Lisa Hallett (Past), Jack Harkness & Ianto Jones
Series: Just Write: Trope-Bingo 2020 [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1897216
Comments: 3
Kudos: 44
Collections: Just Write! Trope Bingo





	Leave behind your Ghosts

**Author's Note:**

> I love and hate the episode "Cyberwoman". Because it focuses on Ianto, but he is basically tortured through the whole thing. So, this is kinda a fix-it for the solution of the whole problem...
> 
>  **Disclaimer** : I don't own any of the characters or anything of this world. I just borrowed them to play a little bit, and I don't make money with the stories I borrowed them for. But the words are mine, so please don't copy them to use them as your own.  
> Have fun,  
> Bythia

Jack had sent the team home for the day after they had put Ed in the morgue and Ianto had stowed away the ghost machine in the secure archive. He felt exhausted himself, but he also knew that he would find no sleep. The older he got, the less he was able to sleep and especially after a night like this.

He had dropped down on the sofa in the central room right beside the med-bay. There was time to take a break for an hour or two, staring at the water tower and trying to think of nothing, before he would take on one of the never-ending tasks in the Hub. As much work as Ianto had taken over in the Hub since he had so persistently asked for a job, it would never all be done.

It could not have been ten minutes since Jack had sat down when he was disturbed by quiet footsteps before a cup of steaming coffee was held in front of him. He looked up at Ianto without taking the cup. “Didn’t I sent you home with the others?”

Ianto nodded slowly. “You did, Sir.”

Jack took the coffee with a sigh. “Why are you still here then?”

Ianto sat down on the other end of the sofa. “I have nothing to go home for. And I…” He stared into his own cup with a frown.

Jack sat up straight, watching the younger man intently, but keeping his silence. He had wondered for a long time why Ianto had been so intent to come back to work for Torchwood after he had barely survived the catastrophe that Torchwood One had caused. The other survivors had all taken measures to get as far away from the remains of Torchwood as they could possibly muster.

Everything about Ianto seemed to be a mystery and he seemed to do everything possible to vanish as much out of the memories of his teammates as he could. Jack had tried to get him to open up, if not to the whole team then at least to him. But there was no breaking through the masks Ianto was wearing.

“If there is anything I can help you with, you only need to ask!” Jack reminded him softly.

Ianto took a deep breath. “You have said so repeatedly, Sir. But I … You said earlier we need to let go of the ghosts. That is not an easy task to accomplish.”

Jack swallowed. “I know. Not when one has seen and survived what you saw and survived.”

“I want to trust you, but I don’t know if I can.”

Jack smiled sadly. “I know the feeling. - I try hard to be nothing like Yvonne Hartmann or Torchwood One. And I tried this long before the beginning of this year.”

“I’ve done something I know you wouldn’t have approved of.” Ianto turned his head away from Jack. “I’m searching for a solution for it, but … I’m starting to wonder if I’m on the right path.”

“You’ll need to give me a little bit more.” Jack did not dare to move, even though he thought Ianto could use physical reassurance.

“I think I need to show it to you, but I fear your anger. I brought … something with me from London.”

“I promise you I’ll hold my anger back,” Jack muttered.

Ianto snorted. “You shouldn’t make promises you are unable to honour!”

Jack sighed. “Okay, maybe you should just show me what you are talking about and we’ll see how it goes.”

Ianto stood up abruptly, but then he hesitated. “I really … I appreciate what you tried to do for me. I may not have … shown it much, but I didn’t miss your attempts to help me let go of what happened in London. But I … You don’t know everything that’s happened there, and that’s my fault, I know, but…”

Jack put the cup down beside the sofa without having taken even one sip and stood up as well. “What do you want to show me, Ianto?” 

He did neither miss how Ianto’s eyes dropped down, searching for his Webley that he had not with him at the moment, nor the relief when the younger man saw that it was not there. It made Jack instantly worry, but he decided against asking what that was about.

Ianto turned without another word and Jack followed him down the stairs. At first, he thought they were headed for the archives, where Ianto spent most of his time, but the younger man guided him into the deeper bowels of the Hub that had not been used in decades. Jack was frankly surprised that the light was even still working down here because there was a big part of the Hub in which he had neglected the maintenance since he had taken over and he was not the first one to do so.

Finally, Ianto stopped in front of a closed and locked door. Jack could see lights on the other side of the small window in the door, but he was too far away to get a look of the room through it.

“This may look more dangerous than it actually is. I promise you, she is no threat to any of us!” Ianto said quietly. “It’s just … she needs the machines to stay alive.”

Jack frowned with the dark foreboding building up. “May I take a look?”

Ianto took a deep breath before he stepped aside without taking his eyes away from him. Jack looked at him quizzically a moment longer, before he slowly stepped to the door to look through the small window at the high of his head.

He reared back just a moment later, as he understood what Ianto had brought into his Hub, anger rising in him and letting him forget his promise from earlier. Outraged, he grabbed Ianto by the collar and pressed him against the wall.

“Are you out of your damn mind to bring one of these things here?” Jack hissed.

Ianto did not move or try to evade him. “It’s not a Cyberman!” he protested weakly. “The process wasn’t completed! It’s still Lisa! I … I’m trying to help her. She is in pain and uncomfortable all the time, but at least she is still alive! I got to her before it was too late!”

Jack shook his head. “That’s not your Lisa in there any more!” He recognized the name from Ianto’s file. Lisa Hallett had been his fiancé and she was listed as one of the dead of Canary Wharf.

“You don’t understand!” Ianto’s desperation was written all over his face. “She has all her memories, she is talking to me and I know how Lisa sounds! I destroyed the cyber unit she was in before the conversion was completed. But there was already too much changed and I couldn’t get her out of it without killing her!”

“The first thing these machines do is killing the victim!” Jack ground out. “If this thing is bound to the cyber unit than it’s using the impressions that are left of Lisa’s memories to deceive you!”

“No!” Ianto stubbornly shook his head. “That’s not true! You can’t know that!”

Jack exhaled sharply. The first anger had vanished because Ianto had at least to be right about the Cyberman being bound to the cyber unit, otherwise, they would have been confronted with it long ago. There was no subtlety in Cyberman at all.

“You know what I am. I’m sure you have found my file from Torchwood One and you know that I can’t stay dead.” Jack had assumed that from the start and never tried to keep it a secret from Ianto. Yvonne Hartmann had known about it and expressed more than once a desire to study him, and therefore probably all of Torchwood One had known about him.

“Yes.” Ianto frowned at him.

“The Cyberman weren’t just in London on that day. They were all over the world, they were here in Cardiff. And I was out there trying to safe as many people as possible. They had managed to build a cyber unit here and I ended up in the damn thing. I can assure you, the first thing these units do, is severe the spinal cord right under the base of the skull. They insert a chip there that creates the connection between the brain and the spinal system of the victim to the Cyberman collective. At the moment the chip is inserted the victim is dead, and all that is left is an imprint of their personality.”

Ianto had gone pale during Jack’s triad, but he shook his head in constant denial.

Jack let go of him with a sigh and took a step back. “How did you smuggle her in here?”

“The sewer”, Ianto muttered. “I … You have to be mistaken! You’ll see it when you talk to her!”

Jack dragged his fingers through his hair and shook his head. A lot of the things that had confused him about Ianto started to make sense. He had not seen any signs of grief in Ianto, because for the younger man there was nothing to grieve as long as Lisa still lived. And he could not afford to open up to anyone, because there was too much he had to hide from all of them.

“You wanted the job to get her into the Hub.” Ianto's persistence over the job made a lot more sense now, too.

Ianto shrugged. “I thought I could find something in the archives here to help her. But there was nothing. You were a lot more thorough in destroying anything the Cyberman left behind than UNIT.”

Jack frowned. “UNIT?” He had taken great care in informing the people in charge of UNIT what a bad idea it was to keep anything that had come from the Cyberman, and he had been assured that everything they had found was destroyed.

“I hacked them before I decided to come here. If they’d found Lisa, they wouldn’t have tried to help her but to finish the conversion,” Ianto explained deflated. “I couldn’t risk it. That’s … another reason why I came here. If nothing else, I know you won’t let her fall into UNIT’s hands.”

“You hacked them.”

Ianto shrugged again. “Not difficult if you have their accesses codes. And they weren’t exactly careful with it while savaging the ruins of the Torchwood Tower.”

Jack snorted, as he had noticed the same thing. “Granted. Why did you show me? Why now?”

“Because I don’t know what else to do!” Ianto sacked down until he sat on the floor. “I … searched for someone who could help her. And I found someone. A doctor who consulted with UNIT right after Canary Wharf. But … some of the things he said … I don’t know if I could trust him. He said that he could try to stabilise her, but I’m not sure if he actually wants to keep her alive.”

“What’s his name?” Jack crossed his arms in front of his chest.

“Tanizaki.”

Jack huffed. “At least there your common sense hasn’t let you down! - He isn’t working for UNIT because he proposed to recreate the process to create the Cyberman, so we could create some kind of super-soldiers. He is fascinated with the whole concept and was very disappointed to not have a living exemplar to study.”

Ianto groaned. “Fuck!”

Jack had to fight against the impulse to destroy anything that was inside the other room as soon as possible. It would be the safest way to do just that, but he knew that such an action would lead them to lose Ianto. And as angry and disappointed as he was, he still recognized that Ianto had good intentions and was suffering a psychological trauma few would ever understand.

Jack sat down beside Ianto and let his head drop back against the wall behind them. “What did you tell him?”

“I didn’t tell him where I am or where I’m hiding Lisa. He doesn’t even know that we are in Wales,” Ianto said hurriedly. “But he knows all the rest. That we worked for One and that I saved Lisa from being converted and that I could bring her out of the ruins before UNIT or you came along.”

“I’ve known scientist like him.” Jack sighed. “I’ve crossed paths with them and was their subject more than once. These kind of people are fanatics for the sake of knowledge, they don’t care about the prices they have to pay to reach their goals.”

“You know a lot about him.”

“I’m monitoring him since UNIT let him loose. Sometimes their irrationality is galling.” They had kept Tosh for a crime she had committed under duress, but this man they had just let go without any kind of supervision, probably because he worked for them instead of against them. But he had not known about the connection between Tanizaki and Ianto, so he should ante up his efforts there. “If he ever tries to create his own Cyberman, I won’t hesitate to kill him.”

Ianto wrapped his arm around his knees. “Will you kill me?”

Jack took a long moment to contemplate his answer. “That will depend on your actions in the next hours or days. It’s the last thing I want to do. But I won’t let you endanger this planet.”

Ianto failed in suppressing a sob. “You can’t kill her, Jack. Please! We have to find a way to save her!”

“She is already dead.”

Ianto shook his head, sobbing freely this time. “No. Go and speak with her. You’ll see that she is still human!”

Jack sighed. “This Cyberman knows that it’s the only one left here. It will do anything to survive, to free itself from this half converted state and get a chance to rebuild his army!”

“You don’t even want to give her a chance!” Ianto shouted. “You have not even really seen her yet and you have already condemned her!”

“Didn’t you hear what I said earlier?” Jack eyed him with worry. “I was converted myself. I still remember the feeling of the damn chip being shoved into my neck. And I remember coming back to life in one of their suits. I’m just lucky that every foreign object inside my body vanishes shortly before I come back, else I would have been trapped in there for a very long time!”

“There could be different processes for it!” Ianto insisted.

Jack shook his head. “Why should there be different processes? In the end, the Cyberman want all to be the same! - What have you told … Lisa about where she is and what your plans are?”

Ianto raised his head with a frown. “Everything. She has already lost all of her autonomy, I wouldn’t do anything without discussing it with her!”

That meant the Cyberman knew probably much more about the Hub and its security than Jack would like. In the end, this thing had been the only “person” Ianto thought he could confide in and that meant he had told it probably much more than even he was aware of.

“Have you discussed your doubts about Tanizaki with her?”

“Yes, of course.” Ianto nodded slowly. “She still wants me to invite him here. She thinks I’m too paranoid, because … I have to hide so much from everyone.”

Jack raised an eyebrow. “And it doesn’t give you thought that she is not trusting into your instincts?”

Ianto shook his head. “She is just impatient! All she can do is move her head on her own! And she is confined into this room!”

“Has she ever complained about that?”

Ianto opened and closed his mouth, blinking. “I … don’t remember.”

“Has she ever said that she misses the sun or the wind or the rain? Or other things you aren’t able to give her here?” Maybe he could show Ianto in this way that there was no human in the other room.

But Ianto stubbornly bit out, “It wouldn’t help her to complain about it, would it? It would make the whole situation just worse! For both of us! And she is constantly concerned about me and the strain all of this is putting on me!”

Jack sighed defeated. Even if he found a legitimate way to bring up doubts in Ianto, he was too invested in his fantasy that Lisa was still alive. He needed something much more drastic to bring him out of this illusion.

Jack closed his eyes. “You want me to talk to her?”

“Yes, please!” Ianto’s relief broke Jack the heart. “You’ll see that I’m right!”

“Or maybe I can bring the Cyberman to confess it’s charade,” Jack replied.

Ianto shook his head. “She’s still Lisa, she’s not a Cyberman!”

“But if it were a Cyberman if the programming had already taken over, would you agree that it would have to be eliminated?”

“Please, don’t…”

“Would you want Lisa’s body to be used by such a thing?”

“Of course not!” Ianto shook his head forcefully. “But that’s not what’s happening! Lisa has been fighting for her life for months! Of course, she’s struggling, but it’s still Lisa!”

Jack sighed. There seemed to be some kind of doubt in Ianto already, even so, it had not been evident until now. Maybe that would help him later to save Ianto from himself. “I’ll go and speak to her. Maybe you are right and it will convince me that it is indeed still your Lisa. Or maybe it will react to me in a way that will reveal it as being a Cyberman.”

“Will you help her, when you have convinced yourself?”

“I will help both of you in any way I can,” Jack promised. And even though he was convinced that there was nothing that could help Lisa, he would keep this promise in regards to Ianto in any case. “Will you allow me to eliminate her if Lisa is already lost?”

Ianto pressed his hand against his mouth and shook his head at first. But then he grabbed his hair and said with a broken voice: “Yes. But you’ll see that’s not the case!”

“Okay.” Jack felt overwhelmed with relief for a moment. “I would ask you to keep out of her sight at first and don’t react to the things I’ll say to her. I want to see an honest reaction from her.”

Ianto frowned but nodded.

Jack stood up and helped Ianto to his feet, drawing him right into his arms. “Thank you for your trust.”

Ianto clutched at him desperately for a moment, before he took a step back. “Stop delaying it! The earlier you convince yourself, the sooner we can start working on a solution!”

Jack hated how much Ianto was holding onto this hope and that he would have no other choice but to destroy it so thoroughly and abruptly. But he did not see a way where he could take the time to ease Ianto into it. He needed to destroy the Cyberman and the cyber unit as soon as possible.

He let Ianto unlock the door and regarded him with a long, worried look before he pulled the door open and took a step into the room. Ianto stood behind the opened door so that he could not be seen from the inside but could glance into the room through the window.

Jack put on the brightest grin he could muster while being confronted with one of his worst nightmares. “Hello there, beautiful!”

He instantly understood why Ianto was so deeply sunken into his fantasy. So much of the body remained unchanged and uncovered from the suit of the Cyberman. How could anyone believe that their loved one was dead if confronted with their face every day?

The Cyberman looked at him with an unmoving face. “Where is Ianto?” There was a hint of worry in the voice, but not enough to convince Jack.

Jack shrugged, still grinning. “Oh, don’t you remember Torchwood’s policy for handling traitors?”

“That is not an answer!”

Jack could see the Cyberman struggling to get up from the cyber unit and he was glad to already know that it would be futile. “So, you don’t remember? Let me guess, there was not enough space to keep all the important memories beside the unimportant ones you had to keep to fool the poor guy?”

“I demand to speak with Ianto!”

Jack laughed. “You are not really in a position to demand anything, are you? And to speak with Ianto won’t be possible. To betray Torchwood is an automatic death sentence.”

The Cyberman looked at him without any reaction.

“What now, don’t you have anything to say about that?” Jack taunted. “You are probably relieved not to have to play this game any more, right?”

“Cyberman don’t feel relief. Emotions are weak. Humans are weak. We will convert you and make you strong and perfect. We would have rewarded Ianto with it if he could have repaired us, although he was found to be not fully compatible in the beginning.”

Jack lost his grin and turned, looking to Ianto through the window. The tears were freely running down the face of the younger man and he averted Jack’s questioning look for a long moment. Jack hated to see the heartbreak and betrayal in the blue eyes when Ianto finally looked up and gave a short nod.

Jack turned back, seeing the Cyberman now openly struggling in its confinements. “You have to hate to feel so helpless. - Oh, right, but that’s two more things you are not capable of feeling, right?”

“You will be deleted and the Cyberman shall rise again!”

Jack snorted while opening the holster on his ankle to get the small gun Ianto had not seen when he had searched him earlier for a weapon. Even in his own Hub, he would never go anywhere without a weapon. “Your friends tried that already and failed.”

Without giving the Cyberman another chance for a reply, he put two bullets into Lisa Hallett’s head and another one in her neck, at the precise place where the chip sat that connected the nervous system of the woman with the suit of the Cyberman.

  
  


After Jack had shut down the machine and disconnected it from the power grit of the Hub, he had found Ianto curled up in himself and crying just around the corner. Without saying a word he helped the young man up and brought him back into the main part of the Hub and through the hidden passage into his bunker. There he prodded him onto his bed and gave Ianto a sleeping pill because Jack knew that he would otherwise find no sleep and he would not dare to leave Ianto alone at the moment while he would be awake.

With Ianto securely sleeping and after a quick call to a friend, Jack went back to the room with the remains of the Cyberman. It was horrendous to see the half converted corpse and Jack started to wonder how Ianto would ever be able to get over the events of the last few months, while he began to separate the remains of Lisa from the cyber suit and the machine.

It took Jack two hours and he did not allow himself a single break until he had separated every single bit of the human remains from the metal. After he had brought those to the incinerator, he took a shower and checked up on Ianto, who was to his relief still asleep.

The next couple of hours he spent deconstructing the cyber unit and everything else Ianto had build to support Lisa. He would meld it in the next couple of days and sell it, as all of it were materials that could be found on earth. The personal things Ianto had gathered all around the room, Jack put into a box and brought it to his bunker during his next check-up on Ianto.

Jack was glad that he had told the others not to bother to come back until the next morning, as long as there was no rift alert. To have to deal with any of their reactions on top of his own anger, betrayal and hurt would not have gone well for anyone and least of all for Ianto. Jack did not want to confront the younger man with his anger that he knew was for a big part unwarranted.

It was early afternoon before Jack was finished dismantling the whole machine and preparing it for their melting furnace. It would take days to get all of it processed, especially on his own, but he did not want to expose Ianto’s secret to anyone else. He needed Ianto to keep his trust in him and to include anyone else into the events of this morning would not help with that.

Jack returned to his bunker, feeling exhausted and tired. But instead of trying to find some sleep for himself, he sat down at the other side of the room to the bed and observed Ianto in his sleep. He feared losing the young man, not only from the team but from life itself. Ianto may be fairly new to their team, but Jack felt responsible for him none the less and in between feeling betrayed by Ianto, Jack also felt as if he had let Ianto down.

Only a short while after Jack had returned, Ianto started to wake up. The younger man blinked and looked at him confused. “Oh.”

Jack raised an eyebrow. “What has you so surprised?”

“I thought … I didn’t think I would find myself here again. I wasn’t sure what you gave me earlier.”

“I told you, it was a sleeping pill!” Jack frowned. “Did you think I would poison you?”

“As you said, to betray Torchwood leads to being executed!”

Jack sighed. He did not like it at all to get these words thrown back in his face. “I’m not Yvonne Hartmann. And you didn’t exactly betray Torchwood. I’m responsible for cleaning up after Hartmann and Torchwood One and that includes taking care of this Cyberman. And looking after you.”

Ianto drew his brows together. “You won’t retcon me?”

“That is ultimately your decision. Do you want to forget? Only the months since One fell or all your years in Torchwood?”

“What other options do I have?”

Jack sighed. “I would like you to stay here with us. To help in any capacity you want and let me help you to get over your grief and devastation.”

Ianto averted his gaze. “I don’t understand.”

“You made a mistake, okay.” Jack shrugged. “Everyone of us makes mistakes now and then. And at least you contained your mistake pretty good. - It’s Hartmann’s betrayal of us all that brought you here, I don’t see why I should punish you for it.”

“I let myself be fooled by … this thing!”

“You hold onto a desperate hope and were used because of that. You’ll learn out of this mistake, that’s all I’m expecting from you.” Jack cocked his head. “You didn’t answer my question.”

“Could you really make me forget everything about Torchwood? That would be nearly five years,” Ianto said hesitantly.

Jack pursed his lips. “That’s starting to reach the limit without taking the memories of your whole life. And it would have side effects. - I know how much you have to hurt right now, but do you really want to forget everything about Lisa? All the good things that happened until the beginning of this year?”

Ianto took a shuddering breath and shook his head.

“It would be safer for your health to take the memories from the day forward when One fell,” Jack continued somewhat unwillingly. “It wouldn’t have much of a side effect and you would remember Lisa. But you wouldn’t remember how she died or the other things you had to witness in Canary Wharf.”

“And could you stop me from digging into it to get the real information? Because I would not believe any of the cover stories about Canary Wharf that are out there. And we both know that is a foolproof way to trigger the retconned memories. Especially if I would suspect that I was in fact retconned.”

Jack shook his head. “I don’t think I could do that. Not long term.”

“I don’t want to forget Lisa,” Ianto muttered. “But I also don’t want to remember her how I saw her in these last couple of months.”

“You’ll need to learn to accept that it was not Lisa,” Jack said. “Lisa died in Canary Wharf. The thing you interacted within these last few months was an alien that had hijacked the body of your fiancé.”

Ianto huffed. “That doesn’t make me feel better.”

“Not now.” Jack sighed. “But there will come a day when this knowledge will make you feel better. And there will come a day when you won’t feel as … broken as you probably do at the moment.”

Ianto swallowed audibly. “You told her … it, that I was dead because you knew it wouldn’t bother to fake any grief.”

Jack nodded. “Yes. And I knew that that would be the only thing to … destroy your illusion. I wish I could have taken a more gentle road to get you there, but I couldn’t risk keeping a Cyberman alive, even one as disabled as this one was.”

“What would you have done if I had brought Tanizaki here?”

“I don’t know.” Jack shrugged. “And I’m relieved that I don’t need to figure that out. - I’m glad you came here and wormed yourself into our team, even so, you did it for the wrong reason. After you came here, I tried to reach out to every survivor of Canary Wharf, because to just see you every day reminded me that I had a responsibility to these people.”

“Did you offer them jobs?”

Jack shook his head. “No. None of them would have wanted a job here anyway. But I helped many of them to set up their new lives. Or to find the help they needed to get on with their lives. - There are a couple of psychologists here in Cardiff who know about Torchwood, the rift and the aliens. Maybe it could help you to talk to one of them.”

Ianto screwed up his face. “I don’t see that.”

“I don’t want to lose you,” Jack said solemnly. “And I don’t mean that you can’t leave if you don’t want to work here any more. But I don’t want to have to bury you in a couple of days or weeks or even months! You have your whole life still ahead of you.”

Ianto did not say anything to that, but he very pointedly turned his head away. It was telling that he had taken a pill from Jack without protest when he thought it would probably be some kind of poison. Jack just hoped that Ianto was not at a point where he would actively search for an end to his life. Only once Jack wanted to be able to save someone from the heartbreak and destruction Torchwood caused.

Finally, Ianto sat up. “I need to clean out that room.”

Jack shook his head. “No, you don’t. I already took care of it. And I did everything I could to give Lisa’s remains all the respect she deserves.”

Ianto flinched.

“You didn’t need those kinds of memories on top of everything else,” Jack said quietly. “I have cremated her remains and everything else will be melted and disposed of. And I called a friend earlier to arrange a small funeral tomorrow morning.”

“There…” Ianto swallowed and averted his gaze. “There already was a funeral.”

Jack sighed. “But it was only a generic one for all the victims of Canary Wharf, right? They didn’t create individual graves for those they couldn’t find any remains of if I remember correctly.”

Ianto shrugged.

“And I bet you weren’t even there.”

“I … had other things to do at the time,” Ianto agreed hesitantly.

Hacking UNIT and searching for a way to get a half converted woman with all machines attached to her from London to Cardiff, but Jack did not say that. He would ask Ianto for details about how he had managed that at another time when he would have had time to overcome his most recent grief and hurt.

“So, tomorrow you and I will lay Lisa to rest in a small graveyard here in Cardiff. You’ll have the opportunity to visit her grave whenever you feel like it. If you actually want to stay here, that is.”

Ianto huffed. “What else is there for me to do? We already established, that Retcon is not a good idea and … I worked basically my whole adult life for Torchwood.”

“Doesn’t mean we can’t find something else for you to do if you wanted that. But that is a decision you can make whenever you feel like it. You have your place here for as long as you want it. But I don’t want you to feel trapped here.”

“Could we stop … talking about this? Any of this?”

Jack nodded. “Of course, for the moment.”

“I … I need something to do. I can’t…”

“I don’t think there will ever be a day when there won’t be something to do around here.” Jack grinned. “We could try to bring some order into the main part of the Hub, although I don’t know how long that would last when the other return tomorrow.”

Ianto sighed. “You are the worst of them all!”

“Am not!,” protested Jack scandalised and was glad to see a twitch in the corner of Ianto’s mouth. “And let’s order lunch.”

“I’m not really hungry,” Ianto muttered.

“Did you have something for breakfast?” As Ianto shook his head slowly, Jack continued, “Me neither, and I can’t remember that I had anything for dinner yesterday. So, we are definitely ordering lunch!”

“Are the others back yet?” Ianto asked warily.

Jack shook his head. “I gave them all a free day. We are all alone until tomorrow.” He intentionally did not remind Ianto that he had been included in that order for a free day, because the last thing he wanted, was for Ianto to leave the Hub to be alone somewhere at the moment.

Ianto sighed and sounded relieved, but he kept silent. Jack could imagine that he would not care much for any company at the moment and was glad that Ianto had not asked him to go.

“Okay!” Jack stoop up. “If we keep sitting here, nothing will get accomplished!”

Ianto nodded and followed his example, but stopped halfway to the ladder that led into Jack’s office, frowning. “How did I get here? I can’t remember taking the ladder.”

“Because you didn’t.” Jack looked at him with raised brows. “Do you really think I got all this furniture down here through the hatch in my office?”

Ianto blinked nonplussed. “There is a secret door. Why didn’t I know that? I thought I knew everything about this place!”

Jack laughed. “I don’t even know everything, and I have seen the Hub grow for over a hundred years now! There is no chance you could ever learn everything about this place!”

“That’s debatable.” Ianto pursed his lips. “There should be  _ someone  _ to know everything about this facility!”

Jack raised his eyebrows. “Maybe you should work on that. You probably already have a head start on it!”

When Ianto nodded before he began to climb up the ladder, Jack felt for the first time on this day hope. Maybe not all was lost and there was actually a chance for Ianto to recover.

  
  


** The End **

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Fill for the "Episode Tag" square of my Bingo Card.


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